Title

Actual Time vs. Perceived Time

Broad Question

Does a person's perceived time change with activity?

Specific Question

How does the type of activity affect a person’s perceived time?

Hypothesis

It is hypothesized that activities based on visuals and/or audio will be perceived to be longer, and that activities that mainly involve movement will be perceived shorter.Rationale:I think that because of my own experience with activities of these sorts, and gaining these results. However, from my research I have learned that these different stimuli aren’t the only things that may affect one’s perceived time. Results can differ greatly from the hypothesis depending on levels of motivation.

Graph of Hypothesis

Variables

Independent Variable: The type of activity
Dependent Variable: The difference between the actual time and the perceived time.

Variables That Need To Be Controlled:

The duration of time for each activity,
the audio for the audio-based activity,
the video for the visual-based activity,
the sport for the movement-based activity,
the duration of time for each activity, <--
the kind of subject used,
the method of introducing the activity to the subject,
the method for recording the time,
the method for getting the perceived time from the subject,
the area around the subject during the testing.

Vocabulary List That Needs Explanation

perception - The ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses.

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General Plan

Potential Problems And Solutions

A potential problem would be that the subject is holding or can see a clock, giving them an unfair advantage. The solution was to make sure the subjects could not see the current time: In the audio activity subjects were told to close their eyes, In the visual activity the clock was covered with a piece of paper, and in the movement-based activity a clock was not available for anyone where it took place.

Safety Or Environmental Concerns

There are no safety or environmental concerns.

Experimental Design

The purpose of this experiment is to see which activity is perceived to be the shortest, and which one is perceived to be the longest. It will use students from Josiah Bartlett Middle School, and will take place at JBES in the science room for the audio-based and visual-based activities, and at Attitash Ski Mountain for the movement-based activity. A total of seven subjects will be chosen for each activity. After the subject conducts the activity, they will be asked how long they perceived the activity to be, and if they were motivated to do the activity. The experiment will be controlled by using the same duration of time for each activity, and using the same method of collecting data from each subject. Images will be taken for each activity, showing each subject conducting the given activity.

Resources and Budget Table

Item	Number needed	Where I will get this	Cost
Stopwatch	1	At my house	$0.00
Computer	1	In the science room	$0.00
Pencil	1	At my house	$0.00
Paper	1	At my house	$0.00

Detailed Procedure

1. 8th and 7th graders from JBES of both genders will be selected.
2. One at a time, each subject will be brought to the testing area. This would be in the science room for the audio and visual based activities, and at Attitash mountain for the movement based activity.
3. Three activities will be chosen, with one activity being motion/movement-based (downhill skiing), another being visual-based (funny cat videos), and another audio-based (listening to music).
4. Without telling the current subject, a duration of time will be selected for the activity. The amount of time will be a minute for the audio-based activity, 3 minutes for the visual activity, and 5 minutes for the movement-based activity. The clock should not be visible to the subject, and they will not have any time-measuring devices for their use.5. The subject will then conduct the activity until the duration of time runs out.
6. Once the activity’s duration of time runs out, the subject will be asked how long they perceived the duration of time to be. The subject will also be asked if they had fun or liked the activity (in other words, if they were motivated to do it).
7. The perceived time and the difference of the actual time and the perceived time from the subject will be recorded on a piece of paper.
8. Then, the next subject will begin the activity, until all subjects have been tested.
9. The next activity will then begin, following steps 4-8, until all activities have been conducted.

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Data Table

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Data Analysis

Graphs

Photos

Video-based Activity

Video-based Activity

Results

In the audio-based activity, when subjects were not motivated their guesses were off by an average of +29 seconds, although when they were motivated, their guesses were only off by an average of +9 seconds. In the visual activity, subjects guesses were off by an average of -6 seconds. In the movement-based activity, subjects guesses were off by an average of 51 seconds. Subjects were most accurate to the real time in the visual activity.

Conclusion

Subjects were most accurate to the real time in the visual activity. In the audio-based activity, when subjects were not motivated their guesses were off by an average of +29 seconds, although when they were motivated, their guesses were only off by an average of +9 seconds. In the visual activity, subjects guesses were off by an average of -6 seconds. In the movement-based activity, subjects guesses were off by an average of 51 seconds.

Discussion

My experiment was to see how different activities affected a human’s perceived time, and to see which activity made the subjects more accurate to guess the time. The results of the experiment answered the experiment question. Subjects were most accurate in perceiving the time with the visual activity, followed by the motivated audio activity, then the non-motivated audio activity, then the movement-based activity. It is hypothesized that activities based on visuals and/or audio will be perceived to be longer, and that activities that mainly involve movement will be perceived shorter. The hypothesis was not supported by the results of the experiment.
In the results of the experiments showed that the movement-based activity was perceived to be the longest (+51 seconds), then the audio-based activity (around +19 seconds), then the visual-based activity (-6 seconds). There were no trends seen within the data and observations. It was hard to identify a trend because the independent variable does not have a quantitative value.
In the audio-based activity, there was a motivated and an unmotivated activity to see if motivation affects a human’s perceived time. There was a difference, positive motivation made the activity appear shorter than it really was. There is not a good explanation as to why the visual-based activity appeared the shortest, in the research it was said that “With duration constant, interval estimates tend to be greater when the limits are visual rather than auditory or tactual”. In one’s perception of time, it appears that when one perceives events of a great duration (at least 5 minutes), their perceptions are rounded to greater intervals. In the movement-based activity, which lasted 5 minutes, most perceptions from the subjects were rounded to 5 or 10 minutes. In the other activities, which were of a shorter duration, the perceptions of time were more specific.
One of the problems with this experiment was managing the duration of time for each activity. Most songs in the audio activity would not match the 5 minutes in the movement-based activity. The visual-activity couldn’t have lasted long enough, either. A constant time should have been set for the activities, but that was not entirely possible. The movement-based experiment was downhill skiing, and it would be hard to stop a group of skiers in the middle of a trail. A different activity should have been chosen to help keep a constant time. There was no specialized information or technology needed to conduct this experiment. People could use this knowledge to help pass time better. If you’re bored, you can look at this experiment and see which kind of activity appears to be the longest. Another experiment that could be tested is if the duration of time spent conducting an activity could affect the perceived time.

Background Research

December issue of the journal Judgment and Decision Making, which has examined the cases of 163 test subjects who have taken part in a game called the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), popular among psychologists.
In this game, participants are told they have to fulfill a task, and are then separated into two groups. One group is informed that it has very little time to complete the assignment, while the other is communicated that it has sufficient time to execute all the demands of the exercise. In reality, both groups are given the same time-frame to accomplish their objectives. The researchers have noted that the people in the group that was told it had not much time were far more likely to make mistakes and work in a sloppier manner than those in the control group.

Without a timepiece, or even conscious awareness, people perceive the passage of time. For instance, many of us believe that we can go to sleep without an alarm and wake up at a predetermined time. In fact, the evidence suggests that although more people can perform such a feat than should happen by chance, a relatively small proportion of us possess this particular ability (Campbell, 1990) . Nonetheless, virtually everyone is aware of the passage of time, and can estimate its passage with some accuracy. The means by which organisms perform this task, however, remains something of a mystery.
Many organisms, including humans, appear to organize their lives around the light/dark cycle of a typical day. The behavioral patterns that emerge are referred to as circadian rhythms because they are organized around a period of approximately one day (in Latin circa means approximately and dies means day). The adaptive advantages of using external cues from the environment are apparent. If an organism could use sun-position cues, for example, to keep track of the passage of time, then it could tell that a flower's nectar was likely to have been replenished or that prey are likely to return to drink from a river. As a result, if you feed an animal at a regular time, it will begin to salivate in anticipation of food at the appropriate time, even if no other feeding cues are present (Campbell, 1990)


Although the sense of time is not associated with a specific sensory system, the work of psychologists and neuroscientists indicates that human brains do have a system governing the perception of time composed of a highly distributed system involving the cerebral cortex, cerebellum and basal ganglia. One particular component, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, is responsible for the circadian (or daily) rhythm, while other cell clusters appear to be capable of shorter-range (ultradian) timekeeping.
Experiments have shown that rats can successfully estimate intervals of time around 40 seconds despite having their cortex entirely removed, which suggests it is a low level (subcortical) process.


There are a number of what Ernst Pöppel (1978) calls ‘elementary time experiences’, or fundamental aspects of our experience of time. Among these we may list the experience of (i) duration; (ii) non-simultaneity; (iii) order; (iv) past and present; (v) change, including the passage of time. It might be thought that experience of non-simultaneity is the same as experience of time order, but it appears that, when two events occur very close together in time, we can be aware that they occur at different times without being able to say which one came first (see Hirsh and Sherrick (1961)). We might also think that perception of order was itself explicable in terms of our experience of the distinction between past and present. There will certainly be links here, but it is a contentious question whether the experience of tense—that is, experiencing an event as past or present—is more fundamental than the experience of order, or vice versa, or whether indeed there is such a thing as the experience of tense at all. This issue is taken up below. Finally, we should expect to see links between the perception of time order and the perception of motion if the latter simply involves perception of the order of the different spatial positions of an object. This is another contentious issue that is taken up below.

Duration, the interval between two successive events, may be distinguished as full or empty (filled or unfilled) in terms of the sensory stimulation that intervenes. An empty interval is bounded by two perceptually discrete stimuli (e.g., two clicks in succession); a duration is full when there is continuous stimulation, being delimited by an onset and cessation (e.g., a light stays on throughout the interval). To experience an empty duration is to perceive sequence, while full duration corresponds to the temporal length of a stimulus.
Human subjects need a minimum of about 0.1 second of visual experience or about .01 to .02 second of auditory experience to perceive duration; any shorter experiences are called instantaneous. Direct, unitary perception of duration occurs up to a maximum period of approximately 1.5 to 2 seconds from the beginning to the end of a continuous sensory stimulus.

Experimentally, the perception of empty duration is found to vary with the sense that marks the limits. With duration constant, interval estimates tend to be greater (1) when the limits are visual rather than auditory or tactual, (2) when they are of low intensity, or (3) when auditory limits are higher pitched. If the unfilled limits are defined by successive stimuli from different places, duration appears longer when the distance between the two sources is greater; this is called the S effect or kappa effect. The reverse is the tau effect, in which the distance is perceived as being wider when the interval between successive stimuli is longer.
The perception of filled duration also varies with the stimulus. Holding the interval constant, interrupted stimulation (e.g., several successive clicks) appears to last longer than does a continuous stimulus; and auditory stimuli appear to last longer than visual. Filled durations seem longer as stimulus intensity (e.g., loudness) or auditory pitch rises.

In the study, published in Psychological Science, a leading psychology journal, researchers Melanie Rudd, Kathleen D. Vohs, and Jennifer Aaker found that people who experience awe, by watching a 60-second commercial featuring stunning scenes from nature, feel time passing more slowly than those who experience another more generic positive emotion, happiness. In a series of three experiments, involving anywhere from 63 to 105 participants, the researchers determined that experiencing awe not only elongates an individual’s perception of the living moment, but makes people feel less impatient and more willing to volunteer their time to help others.
“Experiencing awe heightens people’s focus on the present,” says Ms. Rudd, the lead author of the study. When you are more conscious of the present moment, you “feel that your experiences are fuller, that more can happen or be accomplished during a period of time,” she says.

“The more one is motivated by a given task, the shorter it appears to last.”

“Lack of motivation tends to interrupt attention to a task; a task in which perceptual focus frequently shifts rarely corresponds to one for which there is strong motivation. The more one notices change during an interval, the longer it is judged to be.”

“The more often a task is broken up or interrupted, the longer it seems to take.”

“We first perceive the hour hand in one position, say pointing to 3 o'clock, and later we perceive it in a different position, pointing to half-past 3. So I have two perceptions, one later than the other. I may also be aware of the temporal relationship of the two positions of the hand. Nevertheless, I do not perceive that relationship, in that I do not see the hand moving. In contrast, I do see the second hand move from one position to another: I see the successive positions as successive.

“There is a further disanalogy between perception of colour and perception of time order. What is perceived in the case of colour is something that has a definite spatio-temporal location. The relation of precedence, in contrast, is not something that has any obvious location. But causes do have locations, so the perception of precedence is rather harder to reconcile with the causal theory of perception than the perception of colour.”

“The more often a task is broken up or interrupted, the longer it seems to take. As a corollary, a period of doing nothing appears longer than an equally long period when one is doing something. Similarly, relatively passive activities appear longer than do those requiring active participation;e.g., time passes faster for the student who is taking notes than for one who passively listens.”
“Events that occur during the interval being judged have a major influence on duration estimation. For example, stimulus intensity is important. Fraisse (1984) concludes that more intense sounds and lights are judged longer than less intense stimuli. This phenomenon is particularly true for vision. “

“Stimulus complexity also influences duration estimation. Poynter and Homa (1983) presented flashing lights, which flashed on and off in either a simple, regular pattern or a more complex, irregular pattern. Using the reproduction technique of duration estimation, participants provided longer estimates for the more complex patterns. Furthermore, when participants look at a display of dots, the perceived duration depends upon the number of dots and the velocity with which the dots are rotated. The greater the number of dots (Mo, 1975) or the faster the speed of rotation (Tayama, Nakamura & Aiba, 1987), the longer the time interval seems to be.”

“Rather than use different competing tasks, Brown and West (1990) had people perform simultaneous duration judgments. The letters A, B, C, and D could appear in one of the four corners of a computer screen for durations between 6 and 16 seconds. Each letter would be on the screen for a different duration, and each would start and stop at different times. People who were asked to keep track of all four letters were much less accurate in their time estimates than people asked to keep track of only one letter, providing further evidence for the position that timing performance is disrupted with increasing attentional demands. “

“Two proverbs emphasize the impact of a person's activities on time perception. You've heard the proverb, "A watched pot never boils." This saying has inspired several studies to determine whether people overestimate time when they are waiting for an event. Cahoon and Edmonds (1980) told participants in their study that the experiment would start after a delay; the experimenter said he would return later. One group was told to call the experimenter when the water in a glass coffee pot started to boil, whereas a control group did not receive these instructions. In both cases the experimenter returned 4 minutes later and asked the participants to estimate how long he had been gone. The duration estimates were significantly longer for participants in the "watched-pot" group. Note that these results are consistent with the hypothesis that filled time intervals appear to be longer than equal unfilled intervals.
Contrast these results with another proverb, "Time goes quickly when you're having fun." This proverb suggests that filled time intervals can appear to be shorter than unfilled intervals — if the task is a pleasant one.“

“1. Four factors appear to influence time perception: characteristics of the time experiencer, time-related behaviors and judgments, contents of a time period, and activities during a time period.
2. Time is of greater concern to different cultures and different groups within the same culture. Nonetheless, all people have a number of internal processes that follow circadian rhythms, suggesting the presence of an internal biological clock.
3. In time perception research, one might choose a dependent variable from among several options: (a) time estimation, using common units (mins, secs), magnitude estimation, or rating scales; (b) time production; (c) time reproduction; and, (d) comparisons of time intervals.
4. The contents of a time period influence duration estimates; a time period is judged longer if it is intense, complex, and segmented. Some evidence suggests that a filled time period is perceived as longer than an empty time period, although it appears that this might well be due to expectations derived from the information filling the time period.
5. Activities of the participants influence duration estimates; a time period is judged less accurately if people are performing other tasks simultaneously. Time appears to pass more quickly if people are waiting for an unpleasant event, or if the situation in which they are engaged is pleasant.”

“The Kappa Effect is a psychological phenomenon related to the perception of distance, time and speed. It is a temporal illusion that, in some cases, can alter one’s judgement of time. The Kappa effect arises when observers judge the amount of elapsed time between two stimuli in a sequence of consecutive stimuli. Stimuli can be visual, like flashes of light; auditory, like auditory tones; or tactile, like stimulation of the skin. When a subject is required to make judgments about ambiguous temporal intervals (the length of elapsed time) between each of these stimuli, they often base their decision on the familiar functional relations between spatial separation, time, and average velocity. These estimations of the length of time between stimuli can be influenced by the spatial separation, or the distance, between each of the stimuli. The elapsed time between two stimuli can be made to appear shorter (or longer) by decreasing (or increasing) the distance between the two stimuli. Therefore, even when the length of elapsed time between stimuli in a sequence is kept the same throughout the sequence, we tend to overestimate the amount of time between each stimuli when the distance between them is longer. Equally, we tend to underestimate the amount of elapsed time between each stimuli in a sequence when the distance between them is shorter.”

“When we say that an event or interval of time is short or long, what is it that is being described as of short or long duration? It cannot be what is past, since that has ceased to be, and what is non-existent cannot presently have any properties, such as being long. But neither can it be what is present, for the present has no duration. (For the reason why the present must be regarded as durationless, see the section on the specious present, below.) In any case, while an event is still going on, its duration cannot be assessed.”

References

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"Perceived Time Vs. Real Time - Softpedia." Softpedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Mar. 1921. <news.softpedia.com/news/Perceived-Time-Vs-Real-Time-104201.shtml >.
"The Experience and Perception of Time (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Mar. 2013. <plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-experience/ >.
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Abstract

The purpose of this experiment was to see which type of activity seems the shortest, and which seems the longest. Students from Bartlett Middle School conducted activities for some time, then say how long it was perceived. It was hypothesized that the movement-based activity would appear shortest (-2 seconds), and the visual-based activity would appear longest (+2 seconds). Results showed that the movement-based activity seemed the longest (+51 seconds), and the visual-based activity seemed the shortest (-6 seconds).